


And His True Motion Give in Any Place

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [15]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Awkward Conversations, F/M, Injury, M/M, the Faceless Man is a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 01:23:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12738186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Peter and Abdul find the time for a heart-to-heart about dating the demimonde. Finding said time while trapped underneath a bombed-out section of UCH with a broken leg and a head wound between them isn't ideal, of course, but needs must.





	And His True Motion Give in Any Place

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct sequel of sorts to [Fic 7](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12203229) in this series, and contains an OC first introduced in [Part 1, Chapter 2](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11892312/chapters/27093843). **Small warning** for some graphic-ish descriptions of injury, and, as with the previous piece, this contains a **spoiler for _The Hanging Tree._**

*

**2018**

“Peter, stay still.”

Oh. Oh, shit. That  _really_  hurt.

“Allah yil’anek,” the voice snapped, hard and fierce. “I said  _stay still_.”

Opening my eyes proved difficult, because as soon as I did concrete dust fell into them, which made me startle, which hurt like hell, again, and it took me a second to realize that the one doing the screaming was me.

“Damn it, man,” Walid said, resorting to frustration I could understand without my brain shorting out over another language. There was a sudden pressure over my pelvis – his knee holding me down, I figured out later – and then a whole lot more pain from lower down, but at least this time I wasn’t doing it to myself.

“Alright,” he said eventually, just as I was starting to lose track of myself in the staticky buzz of brown haze that had flooded through my head and across my eyes. “That’ll have to do you for now.  _Stay bloody still_.”

I lifted shaking hands to brush whatever it was that had gotten into my eyes off of my face, working at my lashes for a good few moments before it felt safe to open them again. There wasn’t much to look at, to be honest, when I did manage it – just a shape in the dark hovering over me which had to have been Dr Walid, and flickering, distant, totally inadequate light from broken fluorescent tubes, and, above us – really not all that far above us – the destroyed remnants of what had been the ceiling of Walid’s office at UCH, dangling ripped wires and broken bits of pipe.

“Fuck,” I said.

***

It had taken us about a month after the dream-attack on Dr Walid to realize that Chorley had made a definite change in his tactics. 

At first, though with unease, Nightingale and I had settled on the idea that the demon trap in the pavement of Russell Square was just the latest bit of evidence that our favorite insane and ethically-challenged practitioner had no regrets about injuring innocent and bystanding members of the public in his quest to get at us. It fit rather well into what we knew of him, after all, and his propensity for sowing chaos at random places and times.

It took rather a while for us to talk ourselves to this conclusion – especially for Nightingale, who, understandably, was taking the temporary decommissioning of our top medical expert very personally – but with Walid back on the job at UCH within a couple of days and spring coming gloriously on, there wasn’t much more we could take from the incident besides yet another ratcheting up of our background levels of paranoia and caution. 

But then, in May, Sahra Guleed called to say that she had nearly been barreled over by what she described as a man who looked ‘Like those tiger people you keep banging on about’ while on a callout to break up a boozy brawl in Leicester Square one night. She didn’t sound much bothered about it, actually, and I was more than willing to accept her assurance that she didn’t think she had been in danger, and that she was just reporting in for the sake of reporting in. Being a copper meant you were hyper-aware of these sorts of things, after all.

And then Jennifer Vaughan, who was very much a normal, sensible person with regular instincts when it came to self-preservation, called the Folly one night near the end of the month, sounding nervous, to say that there was someone standing at the bottom of her garden.

“Stay well back in the house,” I said down my mobile as Nightingale and I hurried into the Jag. “Keep talking to me. What are they doing now?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” the doctor said, calmer, in her rolling Welsh burr. “ _Just standing and staring_.”

“Can you see anything of their face?”

“ _I can see_ _that_ _there_ is _a face, if that’s what you’re asking_ ,” Vaughan replied. “ _They’re_ _standing in shadow. Too dark for details._ ”

By the time we made it into South London and to the row house Vaughan was sharing with a friend – currently on holiday, she explained – in New Cross, whichever minion of Chorley’s it was who had visited was gone, and Dr Vaughan, safe and sound, though pale, served us tea in her homey kitchen while Nightingale went about casting a series of wards that would protect the house up to the front gate. When he’d finished and come back inside, I could tell from the way he wouldn’t meet my eyes that he must have caught a whiff of Lesley’s signare.

“Is this usual, then?” Vaughan asked before we left, and I couldn’t help but regret that she was getting a taste of what Walid had probably warned her about in the course of her hiring, but that no one in their right mind would take too seriously (for fear of worrying about it all the time). And she was right to ask – Nightingale and I didn’t talk much about it that night, but that sort of direct intimidation from Chorley didn’t seem usual at all. 

The next morning, we didn’t even get a chance to work through our theories before the phone rang during breakfast; Nightingale answered, and stood stock-still in the atrium, the frown on his face growing deeper and deeper as he listened, until he was, apparently, hung up on, and he turned to me with the receiver loudly broadcasting the dial tone in his hand.

“That was Lady Tyburn,” he said carefully. “She wants to know whose car it is that was following her yesterday afternoon.”

I swore a lot, then, and we spent an hour drawing up hurried plans before scattering to spread the news. Nightingale, looking irritated, went off to placate Ty in person as his first port of call, whereas mine, around nine o’clock, was getting to Dr Walid in his ground-floor office at UCH, where I found him buried in a stack of handwritten DNA reports on chimeras; he had clearly been there for a while already that morning, despite it being a Saturday.

“Jennifer’s all right, then?” he asked, having taken a moment to fetch us both our usual lattes from the hospital canteen. “I suppose we should have considered it sooner – that he would take a targeted interest in the Folly and its allies.”

“Yeah, she’s fine. And we’ve been checking in with as many people as possible,” I said, burning my tongue, also as usual, on the hot coffee. “Caroline and her mum aren’t picking up their phones, but I’m guessing they’re okay – they’re always going off places on their own. And escalating to attacking our active officers at the Met or the rivers is certainly a possibility, but would also be incredibly stupid…”

“So that leaves us civilians,” Walid mused, with a careful look in his eyes. “What procedures do you suggest? My house is already alarmed to the rafters.”

“With battery packs?”

“With battery packs,” Walid confirmed, grinning, thankfully not offended at my implication that he had somehow forgotten about the many effects of magic on electronics that he himself had documented. “I’ve also got various wards that Thomas has put in place over the years, and I have landline phones without microprocessors both at home and here.”

“Normal caution in your travel patterns, then, I suppose,” I said, feeling reassured by his confidence, but no less frustrated and deflated by the idea that anyone we knew couldn’t reasonably be kept safe. “Lots of very public transport, no walking home late at night alone. If things get any worse, we can consider pairing you with an armed protection officer.”

“Understood,” Walid sighed, and then he looked briefly at his watch. “As pleasantly alarming as this has been, Peter, I’m afraid I have to cut us short. I’m expecting a visit from an old colleague just back from a dig in Denmark.”

“No problem. Nice shirt, by the way,” I said, gesturing to the t-shirt Walid was wearing under his lab coat as I got up from my stool, his one concession to it being the weekend; it featured a stylized version of Pink Floyd’s  _Dark Side of the Moon_  album cover in shades of grey and black. “Ever see them live?”

“Yes, as it happens,” Walid said, smiling. “1974, in Edinburgh. I was fifteen and took the bus over with a group of friends in the dead of night. Got barred from leaving the house for a month when I returned home – ”

Which is when the bomb went off, and the floor opened up and swallowed us both.

***

It took me a while to get my breathing under control, once Walid had finished doing whatever he had needed to do to my leg. From the small hints of light that were filtering through the debris to us from above, it looked as though he had ripped up the remnants of his coat to use as a bandage, with the remaining half of it draped across my torso. I can’t say I wasn’t grateful, either, because I was most definitely in shock and shivering as I tried to lever myself up.

“Don’t,” Walid said, gentle but firm; he reached out and tilted my head back onto the ground by my chin with his other guiding hand in my filthy hair. “Don’t look at it, Peter. Just relax, and focus on your breathing.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s a compound break, but I have no doubt we’ll get you up and about again in no time.”

“Compound,” I said, my teeth chattering. “That’s the one where the bone comes through the – ”

“Whist, now,” Walid said, gripping my shoulder. “I’ve gotten it straightened and it’s not bleeding heavily. You’ll be all right. I promise you.”

I flailed out a hand under some pathetic impulse that I could do any good in return, managing to make contact with Walid’s chest and the now dust-permeated Pink Floyd t-shirt. “What about you?”

There was the definite stick of half-dried, iron-rich blood under my fingertips both before and after Walid lifted my hand away and held it between both of his. “I’ll live. No broken bones.”

“How long has it been?”

“Not long – minutes. I haven’t heard a thing.”

“Oh,” I said, looking up at the slabs of concrete that were entombing us. “That doesn’t seem good.”

“No,” Walid said, shaking his head. “I suspect Chorley may have arranged to delay our rescue for as long as possible.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him,” I groaned. It also  _felt_  like him – I didn’t know whether Walid could sense it despite his well-developed skill for detecting vestigia, but Chorley’s signare was in the air all around us, permeating the atmosphere with a dull, malignant throb and making me feel like if I even attempted to form a werelight (not that I was anywhere near being capable of that, or that Walid would have allowed it), I would be violently sick. Even if any rescuers were already around to find us, they would have a hell of a time getting through without Nightingale – and Nightingale, I thought, with a sudden clutch at Walid’s hand which he reassuringly returned, was most likely dealing with bigger problems if this was the opening salvo in Chorley’s latest round of attacks.

The pain in my leg was still agony, but it was subsiding – or rather, I was getting more of a hold on it – as I came back to myself and looked more carefully around the pocket in which we were trapped. Thankfully, though I’m not sure what made me assume as much, it didn’t look like any of the rest of the hospital had gone down with us. All of the debris was recognizable as the shapes of things that had once been Walid’s (it felt rather like bits of his electron microscope had taken up residence under my spine), except in pieces and buried what I could only guess was several metres underground.

The fact that it was only Walid’s office, though, made the idea that Chorley was indeed pursuing a targeted campaign against everyone associated with the Folly that much more plausible, which could only be a sobering thought. If it had been Walid and Vaughan in the office when the bomb had gone off, and the shelf of concrete above us had settled slightly differently, it would have been game over for the entire medical division of Falcon.

“Peter,” Walid said abruptly, bringing me out of my meandering train of thought, “I’d appreciate it if we could keep talking.”

I turned my head awkwardly, looking up at his shadow. “For the sake of my health?”

“No, for mine,” he said, and then he turned sideways and discreetly vomited into a pile of ripped-up issues of medical journals. I almost felt sorry, for the first time, for the  _Journal of Hepatology._

“Oh, fuck,” I said, and tried once again to sit up; even in the depths of what smelled like some pretty sour misery, though, Walid had enough about him to put a hand firmly on my chest and shove me back down. “Concussion?”

“I can only assume so,” Walid coughed. He sat up straight, wiped at his face, turned away from me again, and spat to clear out his mouth. “Extra incentive for us both to stay coherent. We need to ameliorate your shock as much as possible before help arrives.”

“Okay,” I sighed, and then, because my head hurt and it was all a little too absurd and awful to have to take seriously, I put on my best impression of a German ubervillain. “What shall we talk about?”

Walid, thankfully, took it in the spirit it was meant, and responded with a weak laugh. “Indiana Jones?”

“Right in one,” I rasped.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ve heard worse starts to Twenty Questions.”

“Ever had a concussion before?” I said, flailing around for a way to begin.

“Yes. Rugby, years back.”

“You play rugby?”

“Of course not,” he scoffed. “I’ve just gotten dragged to muddy grounds in Kent since 1995, and only been told once we arrived that we were both playing. Four times I fell for that – which is when I decided I might as well give in. Thomas was getting most tiring with all that subterfuge.”

“ _He_  plays?”

“When he has the time. He cut back in solidarity when they insisted on moving me to the over-fifties league,” Walid said, distinct amusement in his voice. “I didn’t much like that, and he deferred to my feelings.”

“I should think so,” I said, happy to vicariously share in his indignation. “Still. Nice of him.”

“He tends to be nice,” Walid said, and I could see in my mind’s eye the sort of look he must have been giving me, slightly arch and sarcastic towards The Youth who was likely to assume his marriage was naturally stale. It had nothing to do with him being old, I thought, equally sarcastically – it was more that whole ‘You shag my boss’ part of the conversation which I could certainly do with avoiding.

I only realized I’d said most of that out loud when Walid burst out laughing, and then clutched at his head and just as quickly stopped.

“Well, it’s  _not_  funny,” I huffed, putting out a hand to try and give Walid’s a squeeze in apology. “You don’t go prying into  _my_  sex life.”

“Don’t I?” Walid said; he turned sideways with a groan and tried to prop himself up into a more comfortable position against a slab of concrete behind my head. “I am the doctor on call for the Thames family at times, after all. And before you ask, no, that wasn’t my choice either – but as you know, Mama Thames is persuasive. And the occasional data I get out of them are fascinating.”

“Uh,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry. “Have you and Bev talked about me, then?”

“On occasion. I have known her since she was a child. Learned something about her tastes.”

“Oh, god,” I said, more than slightly horrified. “Please shut up.”

“Shan’t,” Walid said, grimly cheerful. “Go on, then. Ask another.”

“This is ridiculous,” I sighed. “Fine, then. When did you and Nightingale become a thing?”

“1990. When did you and Beverley?”

“Mhm,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Herefordshire, 2014. Might have inseminated a river.”

“Good lord,” Walid said slowly. “Dear me, Peter. I wouldn’t have pegged you for an absent father.”

“Fuck off,” I grumbled, as good-naturedly as I could manage. 

“Not while you’re my sample size of one for how genius loci are born, not made,” Walid laughed. “You two are very fine together, I hope you know that. We all see it.”

“Getting emotional pretty early there, Abdul,” I said. “We may have hours to go yet.”

“Nevertheless, it’s true. It’s always encouraging to see two people find each other in the midst of all – this.”

“You didn’t say that about Jack Wu at first,” I teased; I was getting into the swing of the banter now, clinging to its miraculous power to make the pain in my leg feel like it was very far away. “I remember you calling Nightingale to rant every time he took Agatha out in those first few months.”

“Yes, well,” he said sniffily, “I had my own skin on the line as well as hers, if she were to come to harm. It was nothing whatever to do with his suitability. But in all seriousness, Peter – don’t lose Beverley if you can help it. There are precious few things in this world that deserve being held onto with all your strength.”

“Well, I don’t  _intend_  to,” I sighed, suddenly reminded of just where I was and what state I was in. “Other bastards keep sticking their nose in.”

Walid was quiet for a moment, thinking, before he spoke again. “Have you ever considered giving up your apprenticeship?”

“No,” I said reflexively, and then, of course, once it was out of my mouth, instantly started mulling it over properly. “No – I mean. No, not really. I’m not sure I could give up magic, any more. And even though I had other options before Hendon it’s hard to imagine not being a policeman.”

“But the life you lead now – the Folly and its work, what it demands of you. No regrets?”

“Not  _regrets_. But if you’re asking whether I wish Chorley was locked up somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine and that the rivers weren’t so – you know, rivery, about me and Bev – then yeah, of course. I don’t regret, but I hope for better.”

“Good,” Walid said, giving me another pat on the shoulder. “That’s as it should be. But I hope you know that, were you to ask – if you and Beverley decided to elope tomorrow and hang the consequences, though I doubt either of you would – Thomas would be perfectly willing to release you.”

That stunned me a bit, I have to admit, and Walid nearly reached over to prod at me before I had it in me to respond. “Seriously?”

“Yes. Does that surprise you?”

“Yeah, it does. He doesn’t often give much sign he’s devoted to anything but the Folly. I mean – ” I could feel Walid’s amusement again, and could only be thankful for his good humour. “I know he’s with you, obviously, but  _you_  also know how good he is at keeping all of that quiet.”

“True,” Walid said slowly. “I used to wonder whether it was worth having a row with him over it – in the end it turned out I could live with his discretion. But what I’m saying, Peter, is that Thomas hasn’t put the Folly above all else in his life since he and I made our first oaths. He could hardly fail to recognize the same choice he himself made, if you asked to be allowed to pursue the life you wanted with someone you loved.”

“Huh,” I said, my mind slowly turning over. I’d felt something like this realization before in bits and pieces over the years – the one that came along whenever you saw that a friend or relative (or, most shockingly, your mum and dad) were capable of the sort of all-encompassing, terrible, slightly terrifying love I knew I now had with Bev. The two thoughts of how it had felt to be in that river in Herefordshire, and of my solid, old-fashioned, frankly scary governor, weren’t things that it made sense to mix. 

But Walid and his wedding ring were sitting next to me in the dark, living (just) proof that it could happen, and that somehow meant more than it ever had before.

“Yes,” Walid said, audibly switching tacks, “we have arrived rather early at the maudlin. On to sprightlier things – how are Abigail’s studies progressing?”

Which is how I got to be insanely proud and talk at length, as I frequently was and did, about the fact that Abigail’s entrance scores for Hendon were historic. Which led to an extended discussion over police education, and then to the whole semantic joke that was ‘community policing’ in the demimonde, and then to trying to figure out whether it was worth overhauling the library at the Folly to correspond with some crypto-influenced version of the Dewey or Universal Decimal Classifications.

The shadow that was Walid’s head started to dip as we kept talking; at one point he tried a few different ways of propping his forehead on his knees or hands, but all of them seemed to pain him, provoking small sounds of discomfort as whatever head wound it was that he had made itself felt – so it eventually came down to him sitting as upright as possible and not quite managing it. He was unsteady and swaying whenever I looked over at him, which was weird and disturbing in ways I couldn’t quite describe – a bit like realizing your parents were mortal, I thought hazily, indulging in another bit of hyperbole-by-association.

All in all, I drifted in and out a fair bit as the silence and the time stretched on – time we couldn’t measure, because even when Walid tried his best to reflect enough light off of his watch to see its hands, he found it had been shattered, and neither of our mobile phones, tucked away in various pockets, had survived either our fall or the magic blast of the bomb. Every time I came back to myself, I found that Walid was powering his way to staying awake either with snatches of stories or, occasionally, a gentle humming that sounded like an endless Grateful Dead jam. At one point I asked him which member of the band was his favorite, which he used as the opportunity to give a long-winded lecture on the relative merits of every single one of the dozen or so members over thirty years of concerts before settling, inevitably, on Jerry Garcia.

“They’ll find us soon,” I remembered saying, wanting to believe it and not sure who, exactly, I was trying to comfort. “No one could keep Nightingale away.”

“No doubt about it,” Walid said, a touch of strength returning to his voice. I felt like we must have trod this path close to a dozen times over the course of our confinement, but once more couldn’t hurt. “Besides – I’ve got Agatha’s graduation next week. She’d come down here to murder me herself if I missed it.”

“That,” I said solemnly, “would be incredibly funny.”

It happened suddenly, and obviously enough that even Walid shivered – the air shook, and just like that, Chorley’s signare was gone. The temperature in our cell plummeted accordingly – who knew what else had been trapped in with us as the building sank – and a cacophony of sound rushed in towards us, people shouting and heavy equipment beeping and grinding and, more distantly, the distinct and always distressing sound of journalists clamoring for access to places they shouldn’t be. 

And then, in a burst of yellow afternoon sunbeams which had me throwing up my hands in front of my maladjusted eyes, a fissure opened up in the concrete. In a small avalanche of dust and broken-up building materials, a man emerged from above into our hollow, about twenty feet away, towards what would have been the outer end of Walid’s office. He was covered from head to toe in a white noddy suit, which made me feel a bit smug, thinking that we had beaten the expectations of those who apparently thought they needed to send in forensics instead of rescuers. The man moved quickly in our direction through the newly-brilliant light, and behind him, landing with the thump of heavy fireman’s boots, was the enormous figure of Frank Caffrey, who followed the stranger towards us.

“Thank god,” Frank said as he looked down at me, muffled behind all of his layers of PPE.

“Kevin,” Abdul said, weary relief in his tone. “How are your mummies?”

“Never mind my mummies,” the besuited apparition said, and he knelt neatly next to the both of us; under his facemask he was a solid, pleasant-looking blond man in his forties, his eyes roving over the both of us as Frank stumped away back to the hole to contact whomever else was above. “Let’s focus on getting you out of here.”

“Frank, please tell them to prepare an operating theatre for Peter – Dr Tan, if she’s available and unhurt,” Walid called. “And another for me, with Dr Sidana.”

Kevin, whoever he was, looked sharply up from where he had been gently examining my leg. “Sidana the neurosurgeon?”

He didn’t wait for an answer; he just swung away from me on his knees and, pulling a torch from his pocket, flashed its light across Walid’s face. And then he swore. “Damn. Yep, that looks like a bleed. Stay still as you can for me, yeah?”

“Yes,” Walid said, smiling crookedly; I could tell he was deliberately not looking down at me, because you can bet I had something to say about the fact that I could finally see that his right pupil was blown ragged and there was blood in his iris, turning the sclera of his eye red.

“You utter bastard,” I said. “Nightingale’s going to  _kill_  me.”

“It’s been a slow bleed, Peter, nothing to worry about,” Walid said, though I could see he was quickly losing whatever energy he had left even to talk as Kevin continued to bustle around the both of us, tightening bandages and straightening limbs. “A burr hole and some bedrest will sort me right out.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and then Frank and the horde of orange-clothed, headlamp-wearing rescuers that had arrived behind him started working me and my shattered leg onto a plastic stretcher, and I rather lost track of things.

Surgery must have followed, because there were a lot of bright lights and faces in masks and quiet, efficient, professional voices saying completely neutral things. After  _that_ , there was a lot of blackness which was, for the first time that day, incredibly soothing. And then – 

Swimming my way back into consciousness was easier than I had feared. It all felt very muzzy and blurred around the edges, like I didn’t know where my body began and ended – except for the bit where my left leg was hanging suspended in a harness above me, encased in a thick cast up to the knee. That was pretty obvious.

“Oh, hell,” I mumbled. Thankfully, the effects of what must have been half a pharmacy pulsing through my veins meant that nothing about it hurt too much as I fumbled the edge of the hospital blanket away from my face. “Tha’s a bugger.”

“Indeed it is,” said a familiar voice, and there was Nightingale standing over me, looking fatigued but calm, his tie slightly askew under his waistcoat; he had stood up from a chair that was placed between my bed and the next one in what had to be UCH’s casualty ward, his jacket folded neatly over the back of it. “Fortunately for you, however,” he continued, with a smile I couldn’t help but find reassuring, “I’m told that this particular bugger could have been worse.”

“My calf instead of my thigh,” I said thickly, and Nightingale nodded. “’S still a bugger.”

It took a few more moments of swimming back against the haze, with Nightingale awkwardly adjusting my pillow for me as I squirmed, before my memory kicked into gear. “Shit,” I blurted. “Sir, where’s – Abdul, is he – ”

“Not to worry,” Nightingale said, though there was suddenly a pinched look in his eyes. “He’s right here.”

I craned my head to look over at what I could see of Walid in the next bed, past the little bedside table which was piled with the inevitable flowers and fruits (I realized later from reading the cards that had come with them that Walid had been visited by what must have been an entire Scout troop’s worth of current and former students while I was out). There was a thick layer of white bandages around his head, which I guessed must have been hiding the evidence of cranial surgery, and his right eye was also covered with a patch of gauze; despite all that and the pallor in his face, though, he seemed to be sleeping peacefully, without the support of oxygen, and the banks of monitors by his bed were all showing reassuring lines of green.

“Fuck me,” I said blearily, rubbing at my eyes with one hand. “How is he?”

“He was awake an hour ago,” Nightingale said, in a tone of voice which was half-soothing and half-deeply perturbed. “His vision has cleared, and his mind seems intact. His self-diagnosis appears to be correct, so far.”

“Luck of the devil, both of you,” a friendly Oxbridge voice said from behind Nightingale. It turned out to be Kevin, the man who had come down into the rubble with Frank, though without his noddy suit he looked rather different – he was in the sort of tweed jacket that managed to look far more modern and shabbily professorial than Nightingale’s upper-class ensembles, and his face and hands were both tanned and weathered from what must have been outdoor work. He smiled as I perused him, and then got politely up out of his chair. “I’ll leave you in peace. You can let Abdul know that I’ll regale him with my latest finds when he’s ready.”

“Thank you, Higginbottom,” Nightingale said, and turned back from the distraction that was me waking up to shake Kevin’s hand. “Always good to see you.”

“What finds?” I asked.

“This year, half a torso,” Higginbottom said, with the light of the eccentric in his eyes. “My very own Old Cronagh Man. Speedy recovery,” he added, with no further explanation (not that I was really in a state to have understood him), and then he quietly left, pulling the curtain next to Walid’s bed closed again behind him so we were encased in our private end of the ward.

I looked at Nightingale, who looked back at me. “How long has it been, sir?”

“You were trapped for six hours this morning. It’s nearly midnight now,” he began. “I’m sorry it took so long to get to you, but – as you might have guessed – the shield Chorley placed over the debris took some time to defuse, and there were two other devices discovered which I had to disarm first while the rescuers assessed the situation here.”

“Where?”

“One at Sahra Guleed’s nick. The other – ”

He paused, and swallowed, and I fought back dread. “The other was found in a classroom at the primary school attended by DI Stephanopolous’s children. It was a school sports day today.”

“Jesus,” I breathed.

“Indeed,” Nightingale said wearily. He took my moment of stunned silence as a chance to settle back in his chair with a sigh, crossing one leg snugly over the other. “It has been quite a declaration of war – one which I suspect he will find rebounds on him with great fury even where he was unsuccessful.” 

Absurdly, I couldn’t help but smile. “Miriam will have his balls for chicken feed. I mean – if Seawoll doesn’t have them for a bonnet ornament.”

“Peter,” Nightingale said quietly. He was looking intently at a space somewhere in the dead air between my and Abdul’s beds, and his face – well, even through the years of working with him and the damage I had seen him do for those I now knew he cared about, I hadn’t seen anything quite like that, like he had committed himself to something dark and otherworldly. “I need to say something which, in retrospect – you will think lesser of me for having not said it before now. God knows I have had the opportunity and the cause, but I didn’t, because of our oaths – ”

He stopped speaking, but he didn’t seem at a loss for words; it was as if he was standing at a precipice, and, somewhere deep in my stomach, I felt my spirits drop, sickeningly.

“You want him dead,” I said, just as quietly. “Chorley. You want to kill him.”

Nightingale’s nod was small, tight-lipped, and painful. “I should have said it years ago. I should have said it for Skygarden, for Lesley, for your sake. I should have made it clear then that I would sacrifice whatever institutional honor I have left to do that for you.”

His eyes were drifting to Walid, and then they stayed there. “I am sorry,” he said, nearly whispering, “that it has taken this catastrophe to make clear my feelings on this matter.”

“Don’t be,” I said, almost breathless myself at the incredible thought that Nightingale thought he owed me any apology. “I’m your apprentice, sir, not your – fuck.” I settled back into my bed, rubbing at my aching head, feeling helpless. “You don’t need to apologize to me. Of course it’s bloody different, I know that. If I were given a choice between saving you or Bev – ”

Damn. The drugs they had me on must have been strong, because I had  _not_  planned to open that particular hypothetical can of frightening worms (and anyway, the ideal scenario would be  _both_ _,_ _always both,_ _of course both_ )– but, against all the odds, it helped. Nightingale’s expression cleared of a great deal of its agony, and he blinked, and then, astoundingly, he smiled.

“Yes,” he nodded. “A life with Ms Brook would be a far more spectacular future than anything I have ever offered you. Don’t forget that, Peter.”

“I don’t plan to,” I grinned. Walid had been even more right about my boss than he had made out, and that proof that he was very essentially human felt briefly precious. 

A more sobering thought was creeping up on me, though, and I couldn’t help but ask. “What  _do_  you plan to do? When we meet Chorley again?”

Nightingale took a long, calming breath, held it a moment, and then let it out in a sigh, his gaze still flickering over to Walid. “I have to say I don’t know. The demands of our service dictate, of course, that we detain him, and I understand all the logic and principles that stand behind that demand. I take no pleasure whatever in the realization that there is some part of me that remains barbaric,” he went on, a slight twinge in his eyes telling me that he was thinking of the war, and how hard he had tried to escape its clutches. “But if it should come to pass…”

I helped him out: after all the months and years and exhaustion of being taken for a pawn, of Skygarden and Lesley and all the Little Crocodiles and their damage and cruelty, I felt something slip inside me and click, nauseatingly, into place. 

It could have been the drugs – I’d certainly have to give myself a stern talking to when I was sober and able to think through the implications of my decision – but I said it anyway. “If you get to him first, sir – right now? I’m not sure I’d stop you.”

Nightingale’s lips pulled sideways in a grim smile. “I’m not sure you  _could_  stop me.”

“Rude,” I muttered. So much morphine.

“But – thank you,” he added, his tone deep and serious, the sort of voice that concluded agreements and oaths and ruled over lives. “Rest assured I appreciate what it means for you to say that, Peter.”

I must have fallen asleep again in the silence which fell after that, which, to be honest, was by far the most comfortable option for all concerned. I’ve never found it easy to  _stay_ asleep in a hospital bed, though – all the wrong angles, all the scratchiest sheets, too much light – so I kept turning my head and what I could of my body with my leg blissfully and painlessly suspended, and remembered flashes. Remembered Beverley arriving in a flurry of rainclouds, yawning next to me, and the kiss she gave me just before morning broke and the moment when she left again, with her damp wetsuit in her bag; remembered the visit of a worried Dr Vaughan, who looked doctorly and Welshly mothering as she fussed over an oblivious Walid for a few minutes before taking her own leave.

Remembered Nightingale, with a cup of half-melted ice chips in his hand, whispering little questions and nothings to Walid, who replied in a faint, but steady voice; remembered how odd, and yet how touching, it was to see Nightingale’s head leaned forward from his chair into the bed and Walid’s side, and Walid’s bandaged hand idly stroking through his hair. 

Astonishingly – even under those circumstances – it felt strangely like everything was right in our worlds.

*

**Author's Note:**

> I am 99% sure that I invented Stephanopolous and her wife having kids, but I'm also pretty sure I'm not the first one in the fandom to come up with it? Title from a poem published by Richard Lovatt in _The Ladies Dairy_ (1733). Thanks for reading!


End file.
